Evonik Industries AG (Essen, Germany; www.evonik.de) has now launched an additional production area and erected a new building to house research, development and scaleup operations for fixed-bed catalysts at its Marl, Germany site.
The specialty-chemicals group has made a low double-digit million euro investment to expand its existing production capacities and erect a new building for operations revolving around the continued improvement of fixed-bed catalysts.
Fixed-bed catalysts are used mostly in large-scale continuous processes involved in the manufacture of base chemicals. The new scaleup plant is available to research-and-development staff for the development of catalyst formulas at the laboratory scale before using pilot units to up-scale those formulas and optimize them for applications in commercial production.
The expansion and construction measures have also created spatial links between all areas, including closer working proximity, easier enablement of parallel operations of machines and systems and improved communication among staff. Furthermore, the outfitting of existing facilities with state-of-the-art control technology has put capacity utilization on an even more efficient footing, says Evonik.
In the production area, Evonik has set up an additional facility for the optimized forming of catalysts for customer delivery and application. Outfitted with highly innovative technology, this new facility enables much improved material flow for the multiple processes involved, thereby almost completely eliminating the need for manual material transport. Additionally, new analysis and measuring techniques now allow the process to be precision-controlled.